AdWords Product Extensions and Your Google Product Feed

With all the various ad extensions available to AdWords advertisers nowadays it can be a bit of a struggle of keep on top of everything and make sure that they are all working as well as they should.

I think by now everyone is pretty familiar with Sitelinks and how great they can be for improving CTR and how you can use them to push time sensitive promotions. As such I can confidently predict that everyone is running test after test on your links finding out what the best character lengths & offers are.

Since November 2009 in the US advertisers another extension available to advertisers has been Product Extensions. These extensions allow advertisers to not only push their products and promotions through the copy of their ads but also to include images of their goods within a ‘plusbox’ below the copy. When first shown the ad looks very similar to the other ads on the pages except with the additional one line of test that reads “Show products from this advertiser for {keyword}. When the searcher clicks on the plusbox next to this line of text a small window opens below the ad (pushing other advertisers further down the page) and a filmstrip of up to 6 items is shown. An example of this is type of ad ‘opened up’ is shown below.

This extension finally made its way over the pond late in 2010 & I was very keen to trial and run this type of ad as I had found great results from using Sitelinks previously, however, after running the extension for a while I became very frustrated with the lack of apparent control over which products were shown & when as well as tracking the extension accurately. Unlike the Sitelinks extension where you can manually fudge the tracking by adding a Sitelink= parameter to the URL, finding a way of tracking this extension was slightly more difficult as the products were taken straight from your Google Merchant Center which meant that the same feed was used to promote your products on Google Products.

One thing I’m not sure people realise with product extensions though is the amount of control you can have over exactly which products are shown when. Hopefully below you’ll be able to see that by adding just a couple of extra columns of data into your Google feeds you can make sure that every time the extension fires you’re showing the products you want to. Under each attribute I’ll show you what type it is and also what it will look like in your feeds (in either the text/tab delimited format or the XML format).

Before I go through these additions I’m going to make the assumption that you’ve already created your Google Merchant account & that you have also linked it to your AdWords account (If you haven’t done either of these & you are an online retailer you should definitely look at doing them now).

NOTE: At this point it’s also probably best to say that Google state that being able to manipulate your merchant feeds in the following ways is only available to advertisers in the US and the UK. They say that they are looking to increasing the number of markets that can use these features but I don’t know firsthand if this has changed. If you are advertising outside of these areas and you’ve had success let me know in the comments.

Grouping Attributes: There are a couple of different attributes available for grouping your products depending on what you require but they both allow you to organise your campaigns with specific groups of products.

adwords_grouping [adwords_grouping]
This can be used to group products in an arbitrary way and can be used to filter products or limit a campaign to a group of products if you want to bid differently for a group of products. This is a required field if you want to bid differently to different subsets of products in the CPC or CPA % version. It can only hold one value.

Type

String

Text/Tab delimited

shirts

XML

<g:adwords_grouping>shirts</g:adwords_grouping>

adwords_labels [adwords_labels]
This is very similar to adwords_grouping, but it will only work on CPC, whereas the previous version worked on both CPC and CPA versions. This attribute can also hold multiple values, meaning that you can tag a product with multiple labels.

Exclusion Attributes: This attribute allows you to exclude products from Product Ads. Such as special offers or sale items (if that’s what you want to do). If you don’t include this in your feed they will assume that they can show all your products in the ads.

adwords_publish [adwords_publish]

Type

Boolean

Text/Tab delimited

true OR false

XML

<g:adwords_publish>true</g:adwords_publish>

Tracking Attributes: As with the grouping attributes there are a number of different options available to advertisers here depending on what they want to do.

adwords_redirect [adwords_redirect]
This allows advertisers to override the product URL when the product is shown within the context of Product Ads. Gives advertisers the ability to track different sources of traffic separately from Google Product Search.

adwords_queryparam [adwords_queryparam]
This attribute is similar to the redirect above but instead of over-riding the URL it lets you add a value to the end of it. The options here are:

Ad type

Keyword

Value

Ad Type
If you use the ad type option (adtype=) your URLs will end with either adtype=pe (for product extensions) or adtype=pla (for product listings). This means that you are able to see exactly which channel the click (and conversion) has come from.

Type

String

Text/Tab delimited

adtype={adtype}

XML

<g:adwords_queryparam>adtype={adtype}</g:adwords_queryparam>

Keyword
For PPCers, this option should be pretty self explanatory. When using keyword (kw=) Google will add the keyword that triggered the ad into the {keyword} field.

Type

String

Text/Tab delimited

kw={keyword}

XML

<g:adwords_queryparam>kw={keyword}</g:adwords_queryparam>

value
If you have any internally defined of campaign/ channel specific parameters that you would like to include in your URLs this is the option for you. Using this mean that Google is able to append them to the end of your URL. You can see an example below.

http://www.mylandingpage.com/product?aid=999

Type

String

Text/Tab delimited

aid=999

XML

<g:adwords_queryparam>aid=999</g:adwords_queryparam>

Hopefully you’ll find that by using some of these additional attributes you’ll be able to use the (relatively) new free clicks data found under the Dimensions tab and optimise your product feeds better!

If you want to know what else you can do with your feeds you can also find all the required & recommended Google Products feed attributes in the Google Merchant Center help section. I’ve also put together a handy chart that includes all the above details here.

Hi Katie, thanks for the comment. I hope you find the info useful. Since playing around with these I’ve found that I have been able to improve CTR of the extension compared to how they were running before. Although they say that the products shown are those that are most relevant to the search query, when you’ve got retailers who run large feeds I’ve found that occasionally the odd products drops into the extension even though there are others that would have been better.

I’m also a BIG fan of the tracking attributes because, frankly, I think the options available to track ad extensions is pretty poor so adding this data in means that I’m able to see a lot more detail compared to before.

I think as well that if there’s any chance that you can take back some of the control over ad optimisation then that’s always a good thing :)

You could use the origin= parameter in your URLs to track where the visit has come from and this is something that I have seen (and used) in the past when tracking visitors from other ad extensions- namely Sitelinks.

Thanks for the information. What kind of reporting can I get from product extensions? How can I differentiate between conversions that came from product ads and conversions from regular ads? How do I know which item showed for each user query?

Hi Naomi, thanks for the comment. As with many of AdWords extensions there isn’t one definitive place to get the info you need (unfortunately), if you look under the Dimensions tab > Free clicks you are able to see the number of times the product extension plusbox has been opened.

You can also see extension conversion data if you segment your data by click type (you can do this at either campaign, ad group or KW level). If you use the adtype= parameter you can also analyse whether your clicks are coming from ad extensions or product listings.

Thanks for your comment. Then the destination URL from the individual sitelink will be the one served. The keyword triggered will still be tracked if you’ve enabled auto-tagging. If you haven’t you should manually add tracking to your sitelink URLs. As Google (still) don’t give us data on how the clicks break down per sitelink you should also add a parameter onto your URL so you know which particular link was clicked, that way, you’ll have the keyword, the link & the ad that drove the visitor.